The Tyranny of Merit (Second 7 weeks) - Zoom
F 2021

Description

Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard philosophy professor, whose lectures on justice attract huge enrollments and audiences on YouTube, has written a book that can be viewed as a companion piece to Thomas Piketty’s books on income inequality.  Sandel limns and critiques the meritocratic ideology that supports and sustains economic and social inequality.  He shows the social harm it does, mainly in giving rise to the angry populism that is evident in many countries of the West.  Taken together, market-driven globalization and the meritocratic conception of success have, he states, unraveled moral ties.  Meritocratic sorting and the notion of “I deserve, he/she does not” has eroded the social bonds and civic attachments necessary to achieve the common good.  In sum, Sandel presents a strong argument against the belief that equal opportunity is morally equivalent to social equality.    

Weekly Topics

1.  Prologue, Introduction and “Winners and Losers” (The social problem posed by the meritocratic ethic.)

2.  “’Great Because Good’”: A Brief Moral History of Merit.

3.  “The Rhetoric of Rising”

4.  “Credentialism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice” (A critique of the competition for degrees from highly rated colleges.)

5.  “Success Ethics” (The unjust and unfair mode of equating market success with human value and human contributions.  Success and virtue are entirely separate goods.  The problem with the valorization of talent. The social harmfulness of the “I deserve” mentality.)

6.  “The Sorting Machine” (How the college admission process sustains the meritocratic society, and how to dismantle it.)

7.  “Recognizing Work” and “Merit and the Common Good” (The need to restore dignity of labor to society, and some suggestions as to how to accomplish that goal.)  

Bibliography

Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s become of the Common Good (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)